InCommon and Comodo have clarified the currently available support options for the InCommon Certificate Service.
Please note that there are separate e-mail addresses and phone numbers for different types of issues. If the distinction is not clear, let us know and we'll try to clarify further.
Other support paths are being considered. For example, we plan to deploy an issue tracking system for enhancement requests to the Certificate Service Manager (CSM). A general help desk system is being discussed as well. We'll let you know as these options gather momentum.
Advance CAMP: Identity Services Summit III
Westminster, Colorado * May 25-27, 2011
https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/ACAMPIdSummit2011/Home
Want solutions for better provisioning, access management or other identity-related problems? Interested in working with identity leaders and developers across higher education to help design the next generation architecture?
Register now for the Advance CAMP: Identity Services Summit III, May 25-27, 2011, in Westminster, Colorado to discuss identity-related implementations and alignment across projects.
Advance CAMP is actively seeking the participation of architects, developers, and deployers of open source and commercial-sponsored software, services, and frameworks to:
- Engage in solving identity-related challenges of importance to you
- Hear about who's doing what and how to participate in or leverage their activities
- Develop your take-aways for using technologies such as Facebook, OAuth, OpenID, SAML, Kuali KIM, OpenSocial, Spring, and Django among others
REGISTER BY APRIL 22 to save money with low early-bird rates and ensure you get a room in the hotel block.
COME EARLY and attend Jasig's Spotlight on Open Source Conference held just prior to Advance CAMP at the same location. Information can be found at http://www.jasig.org/jasigs-spotlight-open-source.
SPECIAL RECIPROCAL PROMOTION for Jasig and Advance CAMP attendees! Jasig registrants can attend Advance CAMP Wednesday afternoon sessions as our guest! Advance CAMPers can come early and attend the Jasig sessions for free on Wednesday morning.
ADVANCE CAMP is sponsored by the InCommon Federation in cooperation with Internet2, Jasig, and the Kuali Foundation.
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Day CAMP: Getting Started with InCommon
Providence, Rhode Island * February 15-16, 2011 * www.incommon.org/camp
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Thinking about joining the InCommon Federation, but want to know more about what's involved? Or have you just become a member and are now working on next steps?
Consider attending Day CAMP: Getting Started with the InCommon Federation, hosted in Providence, RI, by NEREN, OSHEAN and Five Colleges, Inc with support from Internet2. Registration is now open and all are welcome.
The meeting will feature technical and management information for higher education institutions looking to run an identity provider to access federated services. Attendees will:
- Discuss the value proposition.
- Learn what it takes to begin accessing federated services.
- Link up with experienced colleagues.
- Leave with concrete, practical information and a local action plan.
Appropriate for any size school, the meeting offers IT managers and technical implementers the chance to learn more about how to federate through InCommon.
PROGRAM: The complete program is posted at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/DayCAMP.
REGISTRATION: Online registration is open at http://www.oshean.org/Page/Events/Register/121
RESOURCES: Several resources are now available at the Day CAMP website (https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/display/DayCAMP/Meeting+Resources), including case studies and the InCommon Resources booklet, a handy guide for getting started with federated identity management.
INCOMMON DAY CAMP SPONSORS
InCommon Day CAMP is sponsored by NEREN, OSHEAN and Five Colleges, Inc., in partnership with Internet2.
The next IAM Online features presentations on groups provisioning for federated educational applications. Here's the announcement, including the date, time, and speakers.
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IAM Online - Wednesday, February 9, 2011
3 p.m. EST / 2 p.m. CST / 1 p.m. MST / Noon PST
www.incommon.org/iamonline
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Group Provisioning for Federated Educational Applications
Looking at provisioning Google Apps or other off-site services with your campus identity system? This IAM Online will feature two speakers on the topic of group provisioning for higher education.
Nathan Dors will share work being done at the University of Washington in group provisioning, particularly as it relates to syncing campus groups with Google Apps for Education. Tom Zeller from the University of Memphis will discuss ongoing activity in federated provisioning, specifically within the area of SPML (Service Provisioning Markup Language) standards.
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Speakers
Nathan Dors, Manager, Identity and Access Management, University of Washington
Tom Zeller, Internet2 and Emerging Technology Developer, University of Memphis
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Host
Tom Barton, Senior Director for IT Architecture, Integration & CISO, University of Chicago
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Connecting
We use Adobe Connect for slide sharing and audio: http://internet2.acrobat.com/iam-online. For more details, see www.incommon.org/iamonline.
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ABOUT IAM Online
IAM Online is a monthly online education series including essentials of federated identity management, hot topics from the EDUCAUSE Identity and Access Management Working Group, and emerging topics in IAM. Experts provide overviews, answer questions and lead discussions. IAM is brought to you by InCommon in cooperation with Internet2 and the EDUCAUSE Identity and Access Management Working Group.
Course sharing and a nationwide admission system provides an excellent rationale for Swedish colleges and universities to use federated identity management to lower their costs.
A paper developed by Kristina Leve and Valter Nordh, of the Swedish Alliance for Middleware Infrastructure (SWAMI), discusses how federated identity management - specifically identity proofing a student just once - can lower costs. They have also developed a spreadsheet demonstrating the return on investment of the process.
"This can be achieved if organizations in the higher education community join an identity federation and act as identity providers for one another," the paper states.
Admission for higher education in Sweden is nationally coordinated; students can apply for admission to a university, as well as for access to any courses and programs offered at a variety of universities, through the website studera.nu. Students can obtain a verified account via studera.nu or, if applicable, use their existing university credentials.
SWAMI advocates taking this one step further by using federated identity management and allowing students to use their existing accounts to access resources at other universities. Rather than each university creating an account and doing the identity verification, the institutions agree to common policies and technology to allow already-verified students to use their existing credentials.
The paper and the spreadsheet demonstrating the per-student costs are both available at the InCommon website.
The deadline for track session proposals for the Spring 2011 Internet2 Member Meeting is quickly approaching – January 31, 2011. The Spring Member Meeting is April 18-20 in Arlington, Virginia.
Two of the tracks are of interest to InCommon participants: Focus on Federations and Middleware. The program committee encourages track session proposals that share developments, designs, implementations and experiences, and that incorporate elements of the meeting theme "The Path Forward: Envisioning Opportunties." Case studies across disciplines and topic areas are also encouraged.
Details are available in the Call for Track Session Proposals on the Internet2 website:http://events.internet2.edu/2011/spring-mm/calls-proposals.cfm
Please forward this message to anyone in your organization that might have interest in submitting a proposal.
InCommon News - January 10, 2011
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In This Issue:
- Happy New Year from InCommon
- Discovery Service in Production
- IAM Online January 12 – Persistent Identifiers
- InCommon Finishes Year with 264 Participants
- New Participants in December
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Happy New Year from InCommon
InCommon is coming off a year of growth and new services; this success is highly dependent on our community members. Thank you for your support in the past year. We look forward to your help in 2011 as we consider additional services, provide more training and education opportunities, and continue to refine and expand federated identity management services.
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Discovery Service in Production
The new InCommon Discovery Service has moved into production. Unlike the old WAYF (which will be taken out of service February 2, 2011), the DS supports SAML 2.0. You’ll find the details at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/3QA6AQ
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IAM Online January 12 – Persistent Identifiers
IAM Online in January will focus on a panel discussion of persistent identifiers for education, with panelists from higher ed and the U.S. Department of Education. The session will take place Wednesday, January 12 at 3 p.m. (EST). IAM Online is a monthly online education series on federated identity management presented by InCommon in cooperation with EDUCAUSE and Internet2. Session details are at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/tgUjAQ
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InCommon Finishes Year with 264 Participants
InCommon started 2010 with 199 participants and finished the year with 264, a 33 percent increase. Thank you for your support and participation. In addition, the cert service, which ramped up during the summer, now has 79 subscribers (www.incommon.org/cert).
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New Participants in December
- Blackboard (www.blackboard.com)
- Oak Tree Systems (www.oaktree-systems.com)
About Blackboard
Blackboard Inc. (www.blackboard.com) is a global leader in enterprise technology and innovative solutions that improve the experience of millions of students and learners around the world every day. Blackboard's solutions allow thousands of higher education, K-12, professional, corporate, and government organizations to extend teaching and learning online, facilitate campus commerce and security, and communicate more effectively with their communities. Founded in 1997, Blackboard is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
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InCommon News is published by the InCommon Federation (www.incommon.org) for its participants and other interested parties. InCommon is an LLC of Internet2. Send feedback or comments to incommon-info@incommonfederation.org.
This newsletter is sent to incommon-announce@incommonfederation.org. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send an email to sympa@incommonfederation.org with one of these messages in the subject: subscribe incommon-announce or unsubscribe incommon-announce. You can also subscribe to the InCommon RSS news feed, which includes this newsletter, by visiting www.incommon.org/contacts.cfm.
The InCommon Discovery Service is officially a production service. The wide-area deployment of the Discovery Service (based in Ann Arbor) includes a hot spare (in Indiana) to minimize disruption during scheduled and unscheduled maintenance windows. Visit the new Discovery Services web page (http://www.incommon.org/discovery.html) for background information and links to other resources.
Note well that the InCommon WAYF will be taken out of service on February 2, 2011. ALL InCommon service provider deployments currently relying on the InCommon WAYF should reconfigure their software to point at the InCommon Discovery Service instead. Since the Discovery Service is backwards compatible with the WAYF, the new configuration should work exactly the same as before. If you are using the Shibboleth Service Provider software, visit our Shibboleth configuration page (https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/VgQjAQ) for specific instructions.
Unlike the old WAYF, the InCommon Discovery Service supports SAML V2.0. For those service provider deployments that support SAML V2.0, and who wish to take advantage of new SAML V2.0 features, the first thing you need to do is update your InCommon Federation metadata. Visit the InCommon Discovery Service technical page (https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/FgEFAQ) for a general description of what's required. Again, if you are using the Shibboleth Service Provider software, visit our Shibboleth configuration page (https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/VgQjAQ) for specific instructions on how to upgrade to SAML V2.0.
Also on February 2, we will deploy a new user interface with incremental search, the #1 requested feature. Any metadata or software configuration changes made between now and then will be preserved, so please schedule your metadata and software upgrades NOW. If you have have any questions, visit our FAQ at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/SAQjAQ or send e-mail to incommon-participants@incommon.org.